#he looks at Osha and Mae and is constantly forced to look at how much he's hurt them both

[ncfan-1]

Tumblr just ate the post I was trying to write, so I'm gonna give a shorter, admittedly more jumbled version:

I called a lot of what happened in Episode 7:

I never seriously thought that Mae killed anyone. The Evil Child Killed Everyone narrative was ludicrous on its face, and given the way things wound up shaking out, it seems like framing her for the deaths was the worst thing the four Jedi did that night. I sometimes questioned whether she even started the fire, but I figured that if she did, it was probably at an adult’s instigation. And I never thought she intended for it to get so out of hand. Mae is bossy and clingy towards Osha, sure, and she acts out in ways that are, umm, not great, but it was such an extreme escalation of her behavior that it seemed like someone was putting words in her mouth, actions-wise. In the end, she was just a pawn in someone else’s game. It’s… rough. My heart has hurt for her since Day 1, since she’s obviously in a lot of pain, but it aches for her now.

Sol is a wolf in sheep’s clothing who didn’t realize he was a wolf until it was too late, and I love him for that; it’s so fascinating.

I posited that Sol might have killed Mother Aniseya, and that Mae might well have seen him do it. In a moment of tragic impulse, but still… I thought that Mae seemed afraid of Sol in a way that she didn’t seem afraid of Indara or Torbin. There’s the way she responds to him during their confrontation in Episode 2, the way she freezes and throws a dagger at his feet to keep him from coming closer. There’s also the way she starts to subtly freak out in Episode 6 when she’s strapped down to the table and Sol puts his hand near her head. Small wonder; she watched him impale her mother on a lightsaber. I wonder, does he see Aniseya in her eyes every time he looks at her? Mae is Sol’s reckoning, the blood he can’t wash off of his hands no matter how hard he tries. She is his guilt, his failure, his shame.

Sol is wracked with guilt for a reason. Sol keeps putting off telling Osha the truth for a reason. His connection with her seems to have been a platonic form of love at first sight, but it also seems to have been tainted with selfishness from the start. He loves her desperately, he doesn’t want to lose her love, but their relationship is built on the foundation of a lie that has caused Osha so much pain. There are so many layers to the clusterfuck that is that lie, and it makes perfect sense why Sol keeps running interference when Osha tries to confront Mae for what she “did.” He isn’t just trying to keep Osha from going down a self-destructive path; he’s trying to shield Mae from retribution that he knows she does not deserve.

He’s trying to protect Mae now because he utterly failed to protect her as a child. He didn’t just fail to save her; he actively chose not to save her. And I think that has eaten him alive every day for sixteen years. There has never been a day when Mae has not haunted him. I honestly think that is why Indara attacked him on the ship and visibly wanted to beat the living daylights out of him. As far as they’re all concerned, Mae’s blood is on their hands, but as far as Indara is concerned, Sol as good as killed her himself.

Was Osha drummed out of the Order because she couldn’t let go of her anger and resentment towards Mae like I think she was? Indara sells Sol on the lie by telling him that after everything else he’s done, he can’t take Osha’s dream away from her, too. But was it the lie he told her that wound up doing that, in the end? Did he wind up taking Osha’s dream away from her, regardless?

I also posited that Mae and Sol’s dynamic could potentially wind up being more toxic than Osha and Qimir’s, and hoo boy, was I right. I want living atonement for Sol, both because we don’t see that a whole lot in mainstream Star Wars, and because I just… I just do. I like him, okay. But while I can 100% see him latching onto Mae super-hard out of guilt, out of remorse, out of this need to love others in a way that the Jedi do not seem able to provide him, and I can also see Mae accepting it just because she is so totally alone, even her own sister holds her in utter contempt, the idea of being loved is likely something she would latch onto utterly desperately, I just can’t see it being healthy. They’re stuck together by blood. He scares her, and she is the living manifestation of his guilt. Give me the trauma-bonded, utterly radioactive toxic duo. Maybe it could eventually become something more positive, because if they end up living in exile the way I think they might, they could learn how to rebuild from nothing together. I want to see Sol learn how to love others in a healthier way. I want to see Mae relearn how to love and be loved.

(Yes, I am utterly obsessed with the potential Mae-Sol dynamic, how could you tell?)

Aniseya getting to be a spooky witch was fun. Aniseya and Koril continue to be drop-dead gorgeous.

Episode Eight probably starts with Osha hurling the cortosis helmet to the ground in betrayed grief and rage. Meanwhile, Mae and Sol are both crying their eyes out on the ship, possibly on each other's shoulders. I do want living atonement for Sol, but I'll admit, I'm not really sure he's going to get it. I'll probably cry if he dies.

[dapurinthos]

some later acolyte thoughts:

+ darth plagueis aka hego damask ii my favourite fucked-up occult scientist, literally bred to be a sith, you utter bitch, welcome to the screen. i am becoming increasingly glad that all we got was the cameo because i'm holding the darth plagueis novel with a circle of salt around me so disney can't get at it.

- though that cameo makes this whole story kinda useless. it's a shaggy sith story. even moreso than i thought it would be. i'm taking mae's memory wipe as a half-win for my 'mae's going to die' prediction because who she was from 8-years-old onward did die.

+ cortosis is on television baby! not just the fuck-off big ascendant sword from the aphra comics, but part of top-level canon (don't try to tell me that's something left behind in legends no there are still obvious tiers of canon).

- can we stop with the whole 'omg the jedi are flawed that must mean that they're actually evil!!!111one' movement? 'what if one of you snaps?' says senator wearing-a-crimson-dawn-looking-pendant well sir it looks like you don't know the history of your own fucking government, which instituted sweeping changes at the last sith war (the result of one of them snapping. heeyyyy phanius/darth ruin) so that the jedi did not have access to armies, large-scale weaponry, etc. and that's at least the second time a schism like that's happened.

it's the senate. it's always the senate's fucking fault because this is star wars and it's always the government's fault. the senate is all 'oooh we should meddle with the jedi' the jedi go 'can u not?' the senate really, really wants to, so they dip a toe in the meddling pool and splash it around a bit, which send the jedi into a tailspin because they're unfortunately under the thumb of the senate and you get vernestra covering things up sorry i've may have been dooku-ing a bit too much.

+/- cortosis's new feature of literally blocking the force is new. the way it works in legends is that it messes up the feedback of the lightsaber and shuts it down that way (a lightsaber blade is more of a loop than an actual blade). sidious wouldn't have had it in his walls if it blocked the force, but here qimir just pops on the helmet and vanishes from vernestra's perception. aw, did someone not learn the quey'tak meditation correctly?

+/- the whole 'you are the same person' thing with mae & osha. is this actually true, given that it was sol saying it (authorial intent reads to me that we're not supposed to trust him because he lied about brendok), but the implications. the fuckery this could bring. a dyad is one person in the force (are the twins one? if they practised?), but what does that mean? you share powers, you can communicate across distances, extra powers, but two people being one is something incredibly fucked up—do they pick up each other's traits? are their minds slowly merging until they, literally, are one person in two bodies? 'always one, but born as two.' i mean really. (is part of the sith notion of it more in this flavour, in that the dominant one of the pairing would eventually take over like essence bleeding instead of transfer?)

+ lololol we're 2/3 for crystal bleeding being done like it's no big thing as opposed to vader's whole vision sequence when he's doing it.

- look. we get it. we know order 66 happens. we know what happens to the jedi. we don't need to be reminded of it constantly. you don't need to have characters in-text be ominously foreboding about it like they know it's going to happen.

- what was the point of having vernestra rwoh in here? like, three lines mentioning specific high republic things? they should've left it as it originally was planned, which wasn't to be part of the high republic storyline. because now it's hard not to read her ‘he justified every selfish step he took with his love for your sister’ moment as a HEY VERNESTRA TELL US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT ELZAR MANN moment. she's not on the high council, there's mention of a 'small council' but nothing more is given on that. is she supposed to be aligned with the shadows? no? yes?

+/- so qimir's basically a mix of kibh jeen and darth venamis, then, in the 'was a [jedi] before he turned to evil' (really. REALLY. the important thing about star wars is that it rhymes, not that it literally repeats) and 'poison-flavoured sith apprentice', respectively. darth dentabis or darth pharmakis it is, then.

[ncfan-1]

God, yes. Not for a single moment has Sol’s death ever felt like a triumphant moment to me. It feels inevitable the way the climax of a Greek tragedy is inevitable. He had so many opportunities to save himself from the death that was coming for him and he didn’t take any of them, because taking them would necessitate him doing the thing he could never do, which was truly confront and reckon with his past wrongdoings, which in turn he could not do because he was so crippled by guilt that he couldn’t even look at his wrongdoings long enough to take responsibility for them.

And the other reason it feels inevitable and tragic is because of Osha. Osha, whom it becomes increasingly clear over the course of the show is a powder keg of pressurized negative emotions just waiting for a spark to set it all off, and her finding out that Sol was her mother’s killer and had deceived her about everything for the past sixteen years was that spark. When she kills him, it’s the culmination of her life falling the fuck apart as she’s forced to confront the fact that everything she thought she knew for the past sixteen years was a lie. She looks at him and think: you killed my mother, you lied to me, you let me think I was the problem, you let me love you knowing you had my mother’s blood on your hands. You lied to me and told me my sister was responsible for it all, and you stood there and watched as my grief and my hate and my guilt and self-loathing for not being able to stop loving her even as I hated her so much ate me alive, and all of it was a lie, all of it was for nothing, I spent sixteen years hating my sister for nothing! And maybe we could have reconciled, maybe we could have been a family again, but maybe we won’t be, maybe we never can be anymore, not because she killed our family, but because I’ve said and done things to her that she might never forgive me for, because of the lies you told me about her! And now you try and tell me you love me?! For sixteen years, I would have given anything to hear you say that you loved me, and you never did, but now you can say it, now that I know you have my mother’s blood on your hands? Only now?!

Osha killing Sol is not a moment of triumph. Osha killing Sol is the final destruction of her life as she has known it, her completely succumbing to her rage and grief, and I don’t think her rage or her grief will ever let go of her again. Because if there’s anything we know about Osha, it’s that she cannot let go of anyone she has ever loved. She spent sixteen years loving and hating Mae in equal measure, and hating herself just as much as she hated Mae for not being able to stop loving Mae even in the face of everything she “did,” and now, it’s going to be the same way with Sol. She will love and hate Sol in equal measure, and she will hate herself just as much as she hates him for not being able to stop loving him, even in the face of everything he did to her.

As long as Osha remains on the Dark Side, she will never be free. The Dark Side is like a hall of mirrors that shows you nothing but yourself. There is no healing within it, no truth. The path she is on at the end of the show can only lead her to further pain. I cannot imagine a second season of The Acolyte that did not portray Osha as completely embittered, constantly going back to pick at the sites of her old wounds, just completely fucking miserable, because it’s the natural progression from where she goes at the end of the first season. How is that triumphant? Osha is now a pressurized powder keg of bitterness and self-loathing; how is that triumphant?

And I… actually can buy that Qimir’s interest in Osha might be reciprocated, but omitting the kiss scene (which I guess would have taken place at the end after they got back to the unnamed planet) was definitely the right call, because it would have been so incredibly tonally dissonant with everything that happened in that episode. That last scene with Osha and Qimir feels so incredibly uneasy and ambivalent, because Osha does indeed look completely embittered, and Qimir… Qimir actually does look a bit uneasy, at least to my eyes?

My take is that in getting Osha to agree to be his acolyte, Qimir has sown the wind, and does not yet appreciate that he must reap the whirlwind. I looked at him and thought “My dude, do you really think you’re safe? She killed Sol, who was basically her father, with straightforward determination when she found out what he did. And following that, she embraced the harmfully self-oriented mindset of the Dark Side and agreed to let her sister be completely screwed over and thrown to the wolves to ensure her own escape. These are people whom she has known and loved for so long, and as for you, Osha’s had head colds that have lasted longer than she’s known you, so do you really think you’re safe?”

Like, Osha might turn out to be a lot better at this Dark Side thing than Qimir is prepared to deal with. I could definitely buy the eventual romance, but I feel like it would have been a textbook destructive romance, because that’s the natural place for things to go from here. And as for Qimir, he has 100% bitten off way more than he can chew with Osha.

Osha joining the Dark Side was a triumphant moment.

The writer of the Acylote said that is how we're supposed to feel:

"You want to feel Osha’s triumph. You want to feel her joining forces with The Stranger...Even though they are standing there, looking out at the sunset, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t."

Note: the tragedy is NOT that a lot of people died, but that the two can't be together (because of Plagueis). (interview here)

Now, if that doesnt absolve villains of their bullshit, I dont know what does.

Let me try inserting some other fictional baddies.

"You want to feel Walter White's triumph. You want to feel him joining forces with the Nazis......Even though they are standing there, looking out at the desert, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t."

"You want to feel the Frey's triumph. You want to feel them joining forces with the Boltons. ...Even though they are standing there, looking out over the Red Wedding, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t."

"You want to feel Anakin's triumph. You want to feel him joining forces with Palpatine. ...Even though they are standing there, looking out at the burning Jedi temple, ready to conquer the world, the tragedy is we know they don’t."